Egypt Clashes Resume After Night Protest Over Mursi

Egyptian protesters opposed to president Mohammed Morsi chant slogans in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt. Opponents and supporters of Mohammed Morsi clashed across Egypt on Friday, the day after the president granted himself sweeping new powers that critics fear can allow him to be a virtual dictator.(AP Photo/Mohammed Asad)

Nov. 25 (Bloomberg) -- President Mohamed Mursi met for the
second time in two days with his top advisers amid efforts to
defuse a growing political crisis borne of the Islamist’s
decision to grant himself sweeping new powers.

The president saw his top advisers and aides, Ahram Online
reported today, as opposition mounted against the decrees,
announced Nov. 22. Stocks tumbled today, sending the EGX 30 down
9.6 percent, the biggest drop since January 2011, after four
days of unrest.

The decrees, which Mursi has said are temporary and
necessary to safeguard the goals of last year’s uprising, place
his decisions above the review of any court or authority in the
nation. A “large number” of the country’s judges and
prosecutors halted work in protest, the state-run Middle East
News Agency reported today.

Critics assailed the move, likening it to the policies of
the regime of Hosni Mubarak that led to his ouster last year. It
also threatened to place Mursi, drawn from the ranks of the
Muslim Brotherhood, on a collision course with the judiciary.
Several top judicial groups announced strikes while secularists
dubbed his step as further evidence the Brotherhood was looking
to cement its hold on power.

The move left Mursi with the difficult task of defusing a
crisis that could mobilize an opposition cadre of secularists
and youth groups that have largely been unable to unify since
Mubarak’s ouster.

‘Fatal Mistake’

“It’s a fatal mistake,” Khalil el-Anani, a political
analyst at the U.K’s Durham University, said by phone. “Mursi
has created a real crisis and a deadlock with no political way
out in sight.”

The decrees were “a big blow to the revolution, the
transitional period and the democracy Egyptians were hoping to
establish that could have dire consequences on the political
scene,” he said.

Nile News reported the Justice Minister was mediating with
the Judges Club, one of the bodies that had called for a strike,
to end the crisis between the executive and judicial branches.

Thousands of demonstrators have in the past four days
flooded the square that served as the focal point for the
uprising against Mubarak. Mursi took the stage there in triumph
after winning the presidency in June, pledging to be the
president for all Egyptians.

‘Police Brutality’

Mursi’s decrees include retrying top Mubarak-era officials,
and state that the committee drafting the constitution and
parliament’s upper house could not be dissolved, allowing them
to escape the same potential fate that befell the earlier
constitution panel and the parliament’s lower house.

Both the legislature’s upper chamber, or the Shura Council,
and the constitutional panel are dominated by Islamists. The
Shura’s president, Ahmed Fahmi, said Mursi should have put the
decrees to a public referendum before announcing them and called
on him to meet with political forces to “end the crisis,” the
state-run Ahram Gate reported. The parliament, however, backed
his moves, according to state media.

‘Unprecedented Attack’

Mursi has butted heads with the judiciary several times
before, including seeing the country’s highest court rule
against an earlier decree to reinstate the Islamist-dominated
lower house of parliament. The Brotherhood has argued the
judiciary is stacked against the president.

The decrees are an “unprecedented attack” on the
independence of the judiciary, Egypt’s Supreme Judicial Council
said in a statement after an emergency meeting, MENA said
yesterday. Egypt’s judges have decided to suspend work in all
courts across the country, the Cairo-based agency reported.

Secular groups and opposition parties have called for new
mass rallies on Nov. 27 while the Brotherhood announced
demonstrations in support of Mursi on the same day, raising the
prospect of renewed violence if the two sides clash.

The Brotherhood said several of its headquarters around the
country came under attack over the weekend by protesters,
including on Nov. 23 when crowds estimated to be greater than
300,000 massed in Tahrir Square.

The number of injured since Nov. 23, the day of the mass
protest, has climbed to 297, MENA reported, citing the Health
Ministry.

More Unrest

While ElBaradei’s National Coalition for Change and others
have called on the armed forces and police to join the
opposition, analysts and commentators such as Wael Qandil, the
editor-in-chief of the independent al-Shorouk newspaper, warned
this could stir up even more unrest.

The revolutionary forces should guard themselves from
alliances with the “feloul,” he wrote in today’s edition of
the paper, using the term for remnants of the ousted regime.
It’s “dangerous for Egypt’s real opposition to form alliances
with other opposing forces that are corrupt and fake,” he said.

The decrees were announced a day after Mursi was praised by
international leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama for
helping to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Gaza’s
Islamist rulers.

Public Sentiment

Analysts including Omar Ashour of the University of Exeter
in the U.K. say the Islamist president couldn’t afford to ignore
pro-Gaza public sentiment at home, especially as he faces a
litany of domestic challenges including the lack of a
constitution, criticism about perceived attempts to limit
freedoms under a new charter and an economy battered by last
year’s uprising. Planning and International Cooperation Minister
Ashraf el-Arabi said yesterday the budget deficit may balloon to
13 percent of economic output if the government’s reform program
isn’t implemented.

Mursi’s decisions “raise concerns for many Egyptians and
for the international community,” U.S. State Department
spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Nov. 23. “One of the
aspirations of the revolution was to ensure that power would not
be overly concentrated in the hands of any one person or
institution.”

Financial aid from the U.S., and American support for
Egypt’s efforts to get loans from the International Monetary
Fund and other organizations, is contingent on democratic
development. Egypt reached a preliminary agreement with the IMF
on Nov. 20 for a $4.8 billion loan.

“Only last week, President Mursi was over the moon on his
endless work on the cease-fire on Gaza,” Teymour El-Derini,
Middle East and North Africa sales trading director at Naeem
Brokerage, said in an e-mailed note.

Days later, “he decided to up it a notch and take freedom
from the people and be the new Pharoah,” el-Derini said today.
“In retrospect, that’s everything against the beliefs of the
U.S.”